Oooh! An interesting-looking Challenge! And it looks like I'm already outclassed!

But no matter. This is going to be a series of maps chronicling a colonial war involving alternate European empires and a very alternate Indian subcontinent. I'm using the geography from my award-losing Gulf of Malabor map (http://www.cartographersguild.com/showthread.php?t=5654) and trying to render it in something more akin to a 19th century engraved style. This first map is the "before" picture, showing the borders and affiliations (well, not yet) before the war.

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A few things of note in this map. First, labels are really hard to get looking acceptable, especially for those narrow slivers of countries that follow rivers. Second, if you look at the borders, you'll notice that they're a bit too rough. Basically, the borders are (mostly) simple polylines with some fractal noise added; getting the mix right is a trick. (Perhaps I need to add some smoothing afterwards.) The borders paralleling rivers are the same process, applied to a transformed river path. It's a really simple technique which looks surprisingly good (though, as I noted, too rough).

Still, I'm pleased with the start. Should be a fun month!

gilgamec

09-10-2009, 12:40 PM

Well, I've done the "after" picture. Some winners, some losers. Next up is a series of maps showing movements of each year of the campaign.
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Because of the limited space, I'm not sure if I can show affiliations and alliances on these maps; it might be easier to show them in a legend. On a brighter note, I smoothed up the borders and it looks much better.

Gandwarf

09-10-2009, 02:01 PM

More contestants, great :)
Nice job so far. It reminds me of Civilization - when your game ends you get a slideshow of important events (cities appearing, empires expanding and collapsing).

gilgamec

09-22-2009, 09:48 PM

Well, other work has intruded on mapping, so I haven't got as far as I'd like -- I won't be able to add in maps of the individual battles, for instance. However, this is pretty much what I'm going for -- it still needs frames, legend, captions, etc., but is only a little bit away from "done".

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Sapiento

09-23-2009, 02:55 AM

With a little bit more refining this will become a very interesting map. Maybe you could increase the size as the flags are a little bit too small to see the details.
Do you intend to do a world map some time?

gilgamec

09-23-2009, 08:57 PM

Another day, another version. It's tricky to get everything packing nicely into a rectangular area, so there's still some glaring empty space and bad alignments. I also still have to fix some of the colours (they should match the affiliations).

(There's also something wrong with my font embedding, so the fonts are a little screwy. I should be able to fix that, though.)
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gilgamec

09-24-2009, 06:08 PM

I've fixed most of the issues I had with the map. I can still see some things that need a-fixin', but nothing that's going to happen in the next couple of days. Unless I have a sudden brainwave, this is going to be my final submission.
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Do you intend to do a world map some time?
Ultimately, sure, but there's a few things involved before then. I'd like to have a better sort of schema for generating continents, heights, and (especially!) rivers than the ad-hoc code that made Varavadhur. Then there's rendering -- I think the next project I take on will be a study in rendering the kind of early-1900s map style that I tried (and failed) to do in this map.